Life coaching…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 11:27 pm by Stuart Davis
Looking for a life coach? Here’s an option…
Life coaching…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 11:27 pm by Stuart Davis
Looking for a life coach? Here’s an option…
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE REAL LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 2:31 pm by Stuart Davis
Song Of The Day: It’s a tie. Will It Go Round In Circles / Billy Preston
Word Of The Day: Rupp / In Britain, a public right of way designated as a road and used esp. as a footpath or bridleway. (acronym for Road Used as a Public Path)
Woke up at 8:30 AM by kisses from wife and daughter, got in the car, and we were off to the club first thing. We now work out as a family four days a week, my daughter goes to the nursery while my wife does NIA and I lift weights. I am so fucking cut. Not. Anyway…
Driving into town, I am staring ahead in silence, quietly observing what passes by in the window, and for no reason I decide to turn on the radio. John Lennon’s singing
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, I really love to watch ‘em roll / No longer riding on the Merry Go Round, I just had to let it go”
and I’m like: That’s deep shit. This dude was a Mystery dude. We all know the Beatles had a deep entwining with esoterica, especially George and John. I wonder how much of the song Watching The Wheels is actually a conscious reference to the Dharma Wheel. My guess is that Lennon knew exactly what he was doing when he chose metaphors that offered popular, wide access to any random listener (Wheels, Merry Go Round), but also was totally tuned into the esoteric meaning beneath that one (turning of the Dharma Wheel, the Merry Go Round being successive incarnations on the way to awakening, and then upon awakening, realization that there is neither excarnation or incarnation, not being or non-being -which he refers to in singing “I just had to let it go”.)
Maybe. And maybe it’s all an elaborate interpretation on my part, just a projection of my own practice and approach to music. But most of the time (two minutes) I was listening to this song while driving, I saw Eddie K’s face in my mind, in slow motion, during his performance years ago on Saturday Night Live, and while I was watching him in my mind (and back the first time I saw it), that was exactly what I was seeing, this guy is watching the wheels go round and round, no longer riding on the merry go round, but he’s still here, still loving it awake more and more, but not caught in the circus.
it all was just a couple minutes in the car. i shrug it off, go inside, work out for an hour on weights. My wife is usually dancing, but today she’s lifting with me. It’s evident immediately that she’s about as at-home in a weight room as I am in a dance class. When I try to dance, I look like an epileptic trapped inside an invisible disco ball. When she tries to lift weights, she looks like a Goddess put to work in a quarry. It doesn’t add up, just doesn’t even look right, her slaving away trying to push some stupid metal plates with pullies and levers. It looks right when I do it, not because I’m muscular or buff, but because somehow the metaphor of doing a dumb, hard, and repetitive action suits me. The metaphor that suits her is dancing, hopping, spinning, rolling, and joyously bouncing her body around a room. She’s bored with weight lifting in five minutes (like me in dance class), and she starts making faces in the mirror, talking to the staff, experimenting with what her cleavage looks like when she contorts her body, asking for food, water, how long has it been, how long till we leave. She finally ends up going to another part of the club to do something more fitting her type. It’s really quite adorable, but I can’t focus with her giggling and sticking her tongue in my ear and saying “look at my boobs!” while I try to press my own body weight (98 pounds and climbing).
After we work out, we take separate cars, she’s got to go run errands, and i’ve got to go back to the house. I climb in the car and hear Billy Preston come on singing Will It Go Round In Circles. He’s singing:
I’ve got a song, ain’t got no melody
I’m gonna sing it to my friends
I’ve got a story, ain’t got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while
I’ve got a dance, ain’t got no steps, no
gonna let the music move me around
Will it go round in circles
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky
Will it go round in circles
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky
And now I’m like what is up with the Wheels and Circles today? First John Lennon is giving me a Dharma Talk on the way in, now I got Billy Preston giving me the Straight Zen Injection with these fucking lyrics. I mean, those lyrics could have been written by Nantenbo or some shit. I’ve heard this song a 100 times, how could I have missed how incredible the lyrics are? Here’s a quick look:
I’ve got a song, ain’t got no melody
I’m gonna sing it to my friends
(that’s a two-line Koan concerning the paradox of a voiced silence, the presence of an absence, and how that fundamental irresolvable dichotomy is actually the Perfected Complimentarity of IS, the song of the Non-Dual. what more can you say about the Absolute and the Relative than what Billy gave us in those two lines? Holy shit.)
I’ve got a story, ain’t got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while
(Remember how Rumi said “Out beyond ideas of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, there is a field. I will meet you there…” Yeah, me too. That is fucking DEEP. Billy has nailed it in two lines. When he says “Story” he means “THE Story, of being, becoming, and unbecoming, all at Once”, when he says “no moral” he means “BEYOND morals” when he says “let the bad guy win every once in a while” he means “There is no ‘other’, you are the bad guy, the good guy, the victim, the hero, and each and every thing that arises. Don’t be afraid of your Self.”)
I’ve got a dance, ain’t go no steps
gonna let the music move me around
(now, what’s the full expression of these realizations? how do you demonstrate the embodied Void? Genpo Roshi said to us in a Big Mind session once,
“Can I talk to dropped-off Body-Mind?”
we said “yes”.
He said “who am i talking to?”
we said
“dropped-off Body Mind”
he said “What does dropped off Body Mind look like standing up?”
we stood up. that was it.
and now Billy Preston is giving us the same directions: Express and embody the perfected combination that is form and emptiness, time and timelessness, relative and absolute, and fucking BE REAL with this shit. have you ever heard a line any MORE ZEN than “I’ve got a dance, ain’t got no steps, gonna let the music move me around.” I haven’t.
It’s not just mumbo jumbo and flights of fancy to notice these things. Dharma is everywhere, all the time. We are submerged in Awakened awareness 24/7, 365 days a year, signals are beaming to us from every point in the Kosmos, messages from our Self, holding the giant Magnet at the Point Of All Places, in the center of all things and non-things. That’s You singing that Billy Preston song, that’s You coming out of John Lennon’s throat, and You listening, and You remembering, You forgetting, and on and on. When I say “You” I mean the “I” that’s “We”. All pronouns add up to 0/1. In IS there’s a number that’s both a one and a zero, both a number and an absence of a number (it would be a good integer for a Light equation, both a particle and a wave coordinate simultaneously).
We live on Earth, it’s 2005, and this is a modern culture. Whether you’re reading this from your computer in Detroit or Dresden, you live in the West in a the modern World. The Dharma is showing up right now, right her, in magnificent, surprising ways, all around us. It’s blossoming in pop music, I hear it being rediscovered, reborn, and invigorated in bands from U2 to Live to The Waterboys to Ottmar Leibert to Saul Williams to Billy Preston and on and on and on. It’s beaming to us from the big screen in films like Thin Red Line, I *Heart* Huckabees, Mulholland Drive, it’s on t.v. shows like Six Feet Under and… well, maybe not very many t.v. shows, but tons and tons of music and movies.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for honoring and preserving tradition, and deeply nurturing the roots of the Mystery in its manifold heritages. But the Buddha was 2,500 years ago. He lived in a different culture, spoke a different language, inhabited a different biosphere, and inherited a completely different history and context. He realized and lived the Absolute truth, yes, but the Absolute is half the story. The Absolute Truth never changes, is undying, unborn, unmade, unspeakable, unknowable. The Relative -which is the other half of this Unity- is CONSTANTLY changing, ever-evolving, ceaselessly unfolding, and it is a WAY, WAY different World than it was under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. COME ON. Perennial Wisdom? Yes, of course. Rigid adherence to a romanticized, spiritual retro-interpretation of a time that we never knew, can never really now, and has limited relevance to our life and experience today? No. No way.
Buddhism, for instance. Although its all about the living, dynamic reality of experiencing Reality “As It Is” and not as we wish it to be, or think it should be, or as we can modify it, in spite of it being the Religion of no- religion, the dogma of no- dogma, it is incredibly, deeply entrenched in a baffling nexus of assumptions, filters, and doctrines. It’s not a Buddhist thing, it’s a human thing. The problem is we mistake Buddhism for “It” or a certain period in Buddhism for being more “awakened” than this period we live in now, and the same holds true for Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Islam. Humans are retro-romanticists, and that Golden Past that everyone pines for, is, sadly, a chimera of staggering proportions, a collective delusion so pervasive it literally re-shapes the fabric of our experience of reality. The religions are a collection of hallucinations so perverse and vivid it may take thousands of years to correct their morphogenetic distortions. In short, we have broken the bones of God, the Subtle body of the Holy Spirit, or Dharma, or whatever was snapped, and it grew back all fucked up. Now we have to re-brake it and allow for a proper healing and alignment.
Here’s one possible take on things: This is, without a doubt, the BEST time ever in the history of the planet to work in the Mystery. There have never been MORE awakened entities in operation on Earth than there are right now, right here, at this moment, in this culture. Sky-scrapers, t.v. sets, radios, neon billboards, poverty, urban decay, fantastic economic boon, whatever it is we see in the landscape and the innerscape, IS the fourth turning of the Wheel, and the Dharma has moved to North America. It is not going to look like it did before -THAT IS GONE- so let’s stop staring at some picture of our dead relatives and waiting for them to walk through the door. They’re DEAD, but they live on in us, and are reborn in our generation, just as we will be in the next. In this turning of the wheel, in the Dharma that is living and breathing and joyfully bouncing through New York, Hollywood, Kentucky, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, let’s NOT LEAVE ANYTHING OUT. Let’s make this the fullest, emptiest inside / outside nesting of Selves ever. We may, for the first time in the history of History, include everything, all cultures, all systems, all religions, all philosophies, all artistic mediums, all messages, all insights, and all MISTAKES - we can appreciate and use their strengths and weaknesses, their healthy contributions and their pathological liabilities, and FUCKING MOVE FORWARD and outward, and inward- all at the same time. We have the opportunity to participate in an omni-directional evolutionary BANG that’s bigger than any Big we’ve ever known before.
But we’re not going to do it by clutching some dead, romantic idea of the way things should be, look like, or feel like according to the PAST. There is no such thing as “two times”, as in “right now” and “back then”. Have we ever experienced anything in the past? No. Our memories of the past occur only in the present. There is no such thing as two places. Have we ever experienced anything in a different place? No. We’re always where it is. Experience = location. We ARE all locations, and also the non-locatable Self, in the absolute sense. In the relative sense, we’re not sitting under the fucking Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. We’re not in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, or Medina, or you name it. There are prophets all around us, carpeting the path with clues and cues, and if we want to Remember, we have to forget what it is we think we should be remembering or how it will be to remember it. Today I was driving my jeep on a new road through a suburban sprawl drinking a double espresso coffee, and I received a COMPLETE transmission of the Dharma from Billy Preston in the form of a 3-minute Pop Song. That’s it. That’s what it looks like, right now, today, for me in this culture. How cool!
We can recognize the Way NOW, HERE because it is unrecognizable to us according to that which we’ve already recognized, and that recognition is unmistakable and singular. It has never appeared the same way twice, EVER, and yet its living, inner Reality is immutable.
This shit is FUCKING HOT.
Can you believe we get to live right now, right here, in this amazing, Big MIND-blowing unfolding of God in asphalt, flowers, jet airplanes, transvestites, and elegant political upheaval? Can we read the Scripture that is written every day on each animate and inanimate object in the World? In our minds? It’s all the Word. Make no mistake, this is THE pivotal opportunity, and our Life (one life, singular) is in the dead center of it. Don’t blow it off, don’t wait for something else. Let’s die for Love, right now, right here, and dance the Dharma while we have these legs. The new sutras are on FM radio.
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE REAL LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 2:31 pm by Stuart Davis
Song Of The Day: It’s a tie. Will It Go Round In Circles / Billy Preston
Word Of The Day: Rupp / In Britain, a public right of way designated as a road and used esp. as a footpath or bridleway. (acronym for Road Used as a Public Path)
Woke up at 8:30 AM by kisses from wife and daughter, got in the car, and we were off to the club first thing. We now work out as a family four days a week, my daughter goes to the nursery while my wife does NIA and I lift weights. I am so fucking cut. Not. Anyway…
Driving into town, I am staring ahead in silence, quietly observing what passes by in the window, and for no reason I decide to turn on the radio. John Lennon’s singing
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, I really love to watch ‘em roll / No longer riding on the Merry Go Round, I just had to let it go”
and I’m like: That’s deep shit. This dude was a Mystery dude. We all know the Beatles had a deep entwining with esoterica, especially George and John. I wonder how much of the song Watching The Wheels is actually a conscious reference to the Dharma Wheel. My guess is that Lennon knew exactly what he was doing when he chose metaphors that offered popular, wide access to any random listener (Wheels, Merry Go Round), but also was totally tuned into the esoteric meaning beneath that one (turning of the Dharma Wheel, the Merry Go Round being successive incarnations on the way to awakening, and then upon awakening, realization that there is neither excarnation or incarnation, not being or non-being -which he refers to in singing “I just had to let it go”.)
Maybe. And maybe it’s all an elaborate interpretation on my part, just a projection of my own practice and approach to music. But most of the time (two minutes) I was listening to this song while driving, I saw Eddie K’s face in my mind, in slow motion, during his performance years ago on Saturday Night Live, and while I was watching him in my mind (and back the first time I saw it), that was exactly what I was seeing, this guy is watching the wheels go round and round, no longer riding on the merry go round, but he’s still here, still loving it awake more and more, but not caught in the circus.
it all was just a couple minutes in the car. i shrug it off, go inside, work out for an hour on weights. My wife is usually dancing, but today she’s lifting with me. It’s evident immediately that she’s about as at-home in a weight room as I am in a dance class. When I try to dance, I look like an epileptic trapped inside an invisible disco ball. When she tries to lift weights, she looks like a Goddess put to work in a quarry. It doesn’t add up, just doesn’t even look right, her slaving away trying to push some stupid metal plates with pullies and levers. It looks right when I do it, not because I’m muscular or buff, but because somehow the metaphor of doing a dumb, hard, and repetitive action suits me. The metaphor that suits her is dancing, hopping, spinning, rolling, and joyously bouncing her body around a room. She’s bored with weight lifting in five minutes (like me in dance class), and she starts making faces in the mirror, talking to the staff, experimenting with what her cleavage looks like when she contorts her body, asking for food, water, how long has it been, how long till we leave. She finally ends up going to another part of the club to do something more fitting her type. It’s really quite adorable, but I can’t focus with her giggling and sticking her tongue in my ear and saying “look at my boobs!” while I try to press my own body weight (98 pounds and climbing).
After we work out, we take separate cars, she’s got to go run errands, and i’ve got to go back to the house. I climb in the car and hear Billy Preston come on singing Will It Go Round In Circles. He’s singing:
I’ve got a song, ain’t got no melody
I’m gonna sing it to my friends
I’ve got a story, ain’t got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while
I’ve got a dance, ain’t got no steps, no
gonna let the music move me around
Will it go round in circles
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky
Will it go round in circles
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky
And now I’m like what is up with the Wheels and Circles today? First John Lennon is giving me a Dharma Talk on the way in, now I got Billy Preston giving me the Straight Zen Injection with these fucking lyrics. I mean, those lyrics could have been written by Nantenbo or some shit. I’ve heard this song a 100 times, how could I have missed how incredible the lyrics are? Here’s a quick look:
I’ve got a song, ain’t got no melody
I’m gonna sing it to my friends
(that’s a two-line Koan concerning the paradox of a voiced silence, the presence of an absence, and how that fundamental irresolvable dichotomy is actually the Perfected Complimentarity of IS, the song of the Non-Dual. what more can you say about the Absolute and the Relative than what Billy gave us in those two lines? Holy shit.)
I’ve got a story, ain’t got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once in a while
(Remember how Rumi said “Out beyond ideas of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, there is a field. I will meet you there…” Yeah, me too. That is fucking DEEP. Billy has nailed it in two lines. When he says “Story” he means “THE Story, of being, becoming, and unbecoming, all at Once”, when he says “no moral” he means “BEYOND morals” when he says “let the bad guy win every once in a while” he means “There is no ‘other’, you are the bad guy, the good guy, the victim, the hero, and each and every thing that arises. Don’t be afraid of your Self.”)
I’ve got a dance, ain’t go no steps
gonna let the music move me around
(now, what’s the full expression of these realizations? how do you demonstrate the embodied Void? Genpo Roshi said to us in a Big Mind session once,
“Can I talk to dropped-off Body-Mind?”
we said “yes”.
He said “who am i talking to?”
we said
“dropped-off Body Mind”
he said “What does dropped off Body Mind look like standing up?”
we stood up. that was it.
and now Billy Preston is giving us the same directions: Express and embody the perfected combination that is form and emptiness, time and timelessness, relative and absolute, and fucking BE REAL with this shit. have you ever heard a line any MORE ZEN than “I’ve got a dance, ain’t got no steps, gonna let the music move me around.” I haven’t.
It’s not just mumbo jumbo and flights of fancy to notice these things. Dharma is everywhere, all the time. We are submerged in Awakened awareness 24/7, 365 days a year, signals are beaming to us from every point in the Kosmos, messages from our Self, holding the giant Magnet at the Point Of All Places, in the center of all things and non-things. That’s You singing that Billy Preston song, that’s You coming out of John Lennon’s throat, and You listening, and You remembering, You forgetting, and on and on. When I say “You” I mean the “I” that’s “We”. All pronouns add up to 0/1. In IS there’s a number that’s both a one and a zero, both a number and an absence of a number (it would be a good integer for a Light equation, both a particle and a wave coordinate simultaneously).
We live on Earth, it’s 2005, and this is a modern culture. Whether you’re reading this from your computer in Detroit or Dresden, you live in the West in a the modern World. The Dharma is showing up right now, right her, in magnificent, surprising ways, all around us. It’s blossoming in pop music, I hear it being rediscovered, reborn, and invigorated in bands from U2 to Live to The Waterboys to Ottmar Leibert to Saul Williams to Billy Preston and on and on and on. It’s beaming to us from the big screen in films like Thin Red Line, I *Heart* Huckabees, Mulholland Drive, it’s on t.v. shows like Six Feet Under and… well, maybe not very many t.v. shows, but tons and tons of music and movies.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for honoring and preserving tradition, and deeply nurturing the roots of the Mystery in its manifold heritages. But the Buddha was 2,500 years ago. He lived in a different culture, spoke a different language, inhabited a different biosphere, and inherited a completely different history and context. He realized and lived the Absolute truth, yes, but the Absolute is half the story. The Absolute Truth never changes, is undying, unborn, unmade, unspeakable, unknowable. The Relative -which is the other half of this Unity- is CONSTANTLY changing, ever-evolving, ceaselessly unfolding, and it is a WAY, WAY different World than it was under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. COME ON. Perennial Wisdom? Yes, of course. Rigid adherence to a romanticized, spiritual retro-interpretation of a time that we never knew, can never really now, and has limited relevance to our life and experience today? No. No way.
Buddhism, for instance. Although its all about the living, dynamic reality of experiencing Reality “As It Is” and not as we wish it to be, or think it should be, or as we can modify it, in spite of it being the Religion of no- religion, the dogma of no- dogma, it is incredibly, deeply entrenched in a baffling nexus of assumptions, filters, and doctrines. It’s not a Buddhist thing, it’s a human thing. The problem is we mistake Buddhism for “It” or a certain period in Buddhism for being more “awakened” than this period we live in now, and the same holds true for Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Islam. Humans are retro-romanticists, and that Golden Past that everyone pines for, is, sadly, a chimera of staggering proportions, a collective delusion so pervasive it literally re-shapes the fabric of our experience of reality. The religions are a collection of hallucinations so perverse and vivid it may take thousands of years to correct their morphogenetic distortions. In short, we have broken the bones of God, the Subtle body of the Holy Spirit, or Dharma, or whatever was snapped, and it grew back all fucked up. Now we have to re-brake it and allow for a proper healing and alignment.
Here’s one possible take on things: This is, without a doubt, the BEST time ever in the history of the planet to work in the Mystery. There have never been MORE awakened entities in operation on Earth than there are right now, right here, at this moment, in this culture. Sky-scrapers, t.v. sets, radios, neon billboards, poverty, urban decay, fantastic economic boon, whatever it is we see in the landscape and the innerscape, IS the fourth turning of the Wheel, and the Dharma has moved to North America. It is not going to look like it did before -THAT IS GONE- so let’s stop staring at some picture of our dead relatives and waiting for them to walk through the door. They’re DEAD, but they live on in us, and are reborn in our generation, just as we will be in the next. In this turning of the wheel, in the Dharma that is living and breathing and joyfully bouncing through New York, Hollywood, Kentucky, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, let’s NOT LEAVE ANYTHING OUT. Let’s make this the fullest, emptiest inside / outside nesting of Selves ever. We may, for the first time in the history of History, include everything, all cultures, all systems, all religions, all philosophies, all artistic mediums, all messages, all insights, and all MISTAKES - we can appreciate and use their strengths and weaknesses, their healthy contributions and their pathological liabilities, and FUCKING MOVE FORWARD and outward, and inward- all at the same time. We have the opportunity to participate in an omni-directional evolutionary BANG that’s bigger than any Big we’ve ever known before.
But we’re not going to do it by clutching some dead, romantic idea of the way things should be, look like, or feel like according to the PAST. There is no such thing as “two times”, as in “right now” and “back then”. Have we ever experienced anything in the past? No. Our memories of the past occur only in the present. There is no such thing as two places. Have we ever experienced anything in a different place? No. We’re always where it is. Experience = location. We ARE all locations, and also the non-locatable Self, in the absolute sense. In the relative sense, we’re not sitting under the fucking Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago. We’re not in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, or Medina, or you name it. There are prophets all around us, carpeting the path with clues and cues, and if we want to Remember, we have to forget what it is we think we should be remembering or how it will be to remember it. Today I was driving my jeep on a new road through a suburban sprawl drinking a double espresso coffee, and I received a COMPLETE transmission of the Dharma from Billy Preston in the form of a 3-minute Pop Song. That’s it. That’s what it looks like, right now, today, for me in this culture. How cool!
We can recognize the Way NOW, HERE because it is unrecognizable to us according to that which we’ve already recognized, and that recognition is unmistakable and singular. It has never appeared the same way twice, EVER, and yet its living, inner Reality is immutable.
This shit is FUCKING HOT.
Can you believe we get to live right now, right here, in this amazing, Big MIND-blowing unfolding of God in asphalt, flowers, jet airplanes, transvestites, and elegant political upheaval? Can we read the Scripture that is written every day on each animate and inanimate object in the World? In our minds? It’s all the Word. Make no mistake, this is THE pivotal opportunity, and our Life (one life, singular) is in the dead center of it. Don’t blow it off, don’t wait for something else. Let’s die for Love, right now, right here, and dance the Dharma while we have these legs. The new sutras are on FM radio.
Eat My Meat…
This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 2:26 am by Stuart Davis
Song Of The Day: New Age Girl / Dead Eye Dick
Word Of The Day: Stridulate / Make a harsh, grating, or shrill noise, esp by rubbing a part of the body against another (insects, etc)
Here’s some fun info…
*55% of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are fed to livestock.
*The percentage of Stphylococci infections resistant to penicillin has grown from 13% in 1960 to 91% in 1998. These bacteria and antibiotics are in the meat we eat.
*European Economic Community banned the importartion of U.S. meat to Europe because of health concerns regarding the massive use of antibiotics in U.S. meat.
*The risk of contracting breast cancer is 3.8 times greater for women who eat meat daily compared to those who eat it once a week; 2.8 times greater for women who eat eggs daily compared to once a week; 3.25 times greater for women who eat butter and cheese 2 to 4 times a week as compared with once a week.
*The risk of FATAL prostate cancer is 3.6 times greater for men who consume meat, cheese, eggs, and milk daily as compared with sparingly or not at all.
*Of the 125 medical schools in the U.S., only 30 require their students to take A COURSE IN NUTRITION. The average training received by the average U.S. physician during four years in school is 2.5 hours.
*Heart attack is the most common cause of death in the U.S., killing one person every 45 seconds.
*Male meat-eater’s risk of death from heart attack is 50%. Male vegetarian’s risk of death from heart attack is 15%.
*Completely eliminating meat, dairy, and eggs from one’s diet reduces the risk of heart attack by 90%.
*Average cholesterol consumption of a meat-centered diet is 210 milligrams per day. Chance of death from heart disease for a male with blood cholesterol of 210 milligrams a day is more than 50%.
*U.S. meat contains deadly pesticides.
*Fewer than 1 out of every 250,000 slaughtered animals is tested for toxic chemical residue.
*99% of U.S. mother’s milk contains significant levels of DDT.
*8% of U.S. vegetarian mother’s milk contains significant levels of DDT.
*Contamination of breast milk due to chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides (from animal products) is 35 times higher in meat eating women compared to non- meat eating women.
*The pesticide Dieldrin ingested by the average breast-fed American infant is 9 times the permissible level.
*More than half of all water used for all purposes in the U.S. is consumed in livestock production.
*25 Gallons of water are required to produce a pound of wheat.
*5,000 gallons of water are required to produce a pound of California beef.
*If it weren’t subsidized by the U.S. Government, the cheapest hamburger meat would cost more than $35 a pound.
*It takes 78 calories of fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, etc) to produce one calory of beef protein.
*It takes 2 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calory of soybean.
*If every human ate a meat-centered diet, the world’s oil reserves would last 13 years.
*If humans did not eat meat, the world’s oil reserves would last 260 years.
*33% of all raw materials (base products of farming, forestry, mining, including all fossil fuels) consumed in the U.S. are devoted to the production of livestock.
*2% of all raw materials consumed in the U.S. produce a complete vegetarian diet.
*Animals in the food processing systems experience lives of confinement, manipulation, and violent death.
*660,000 animals are killed in the U.S. every HOUR for meat consumers.
*Slaughterhouse worker has the highest turn-over rate of any job in the U.S.
*Slaughterhouse worker has the highest on-the-job injury rate in the U.S.
*Each year, 1,000 species go extinct due to destruction of tropical rain forests used to produce meat for U.S. consumers.
*75% of all children under five in Central America are undernourished.
*100 MILLION people could be adequately fed using the land freed up if Americans were to cut their intake of meat by a mere 10%.
*20 Million people will die this year as a result of malnutrition.
*20% of the corn grown in the U.S. is eaten by people.
*80% of the corn grown in the U.S. is eaten by livestock.
*90% of protein is wasted in cycling grain through livestock.
*One acre of land can produce 250 pounds of beef.
*One acre of land can produce 40,000 pounds of potatoes.
*56% of all farmland in the U.S. is devoted to beef production.
(Information from AnimalsSuffering.com)
Eat My Meat…
This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 2:26 am by Stuart Davis
Song Of The Day: New Age Girl / Dead Eye Dick
Word Of The Day: Stridulate / Make a harsh, grating, or shrill noise, esp by rubbing a part of the body against another (insects, etc)
Here’s some fun info…
*55% of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are fed to livestock.
*The percentage of Stphylococci infections resistant to penicillin has grown from 13% in 1960 to 91% in 1998. These bacteria and antibiotics are in the meat we eat.
*European Economic Community banned the importartion of U.S. meat to Europe because of health concerns regarding the massive use of antibiotics in U.S. meat.
*The risk of contracting breast cancer is 3.8 times greater for women who eat meat daily compared to those who eat it once a week; 2.8 times greater for women who eat eggs daily compared to once a week; 3.25 times greater for women who eat butter and cheese 2 to 4 times a week as compared with once a week.
*The risk of FATAL prostate cancer is 3.6 times greater for men who consume meat, cheese, eggs, and milk daily as compared with sparingly or not at all.
*Of the 125 medical schools in the U.S., only 30 require their students to take A COURSE IN NUTRITION. The average training received by the average U.S. physician during four years in school is 2.5 hours.
*Heart attack is the most common cause of death in the U.S., killing one person every 45 seconds.
*Male meat-eater’s risk of death from heart attack is 50%. Male vegetarian’s risk of death from heart attack is 15%.
*Completely eliminating meat, dairy, and eggs from one’s diet reduces the risk of heart attack by 90%.
*Average cholesterol consumption of a meat-centered diet is 210 milligrams per day. Chance of death from heart disease for a male with blood cholesterol of 210 milligrams a day is more than 50%.
*U.S. meat contains deadly pesticides.
*Fewer than 1 out of every 250,000 slaughtered animals is tested for toxic chemical residue.
*99% of U.S. mother’s milk contains significant levels of DDT.
*8% of U.S. vegetarian mother’s milk contains significant levels of DDT.
*Contamination of breast milk due to chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides (from animal products) is 35 times higher in meat eating women compared to non- meat eating women.
*The pesticide Dieldrin ingested by the average breast-fed American infant is 9 times the permissible level.
*More than half of all water used for all purposes in the U.S. is consumed in livestock production.
*25 Gallons of water are required to produce a pound of wheat.
*5,000 gallons of water are required to produce a pound of California beef.
*If it weren’t subsidized by the U.S. Government, the cheapest hamburger meat would cost more than $35 a pound.
*It takes 78 calories of fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, etc) to produce one calory of beef protein.
*It takes 2 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calory of soybean.
*If every human ate a meat-centered diet, the world’s oil reserves would last 13 years.
*If humans did not eat meat, the world’s oil reserves would last 260 years.
*33% of all raw materials (base products of farming, forestry, mining, including all fossil fuels) consumed in the U.S. are devoted to the production of livestock.
*2% of all raw materials consumed in the U.S. produce a complete vegetarian diet.
*Animals in the food processing systems experience lives of confinement, manipulation, and violent death.
*660,000 animals are killed in the U.S. every HOUR for meat consumers.
*Slaughterhouse worker has the highest turn-over rate of any job in the U.S.
*Slaughterhouse worker has the highest on-the-job injury rate in the U.S.
*Each year, 1,000 species go extinct due to destruction of tropical rain forests used to produce meat for U.S. consumers.
*75% of all children under five in Central America are undernourished.
*100 MILLION people could be adequately fed using the land freed up if Americans were to cut their intake of meat by a mere 10%.
*20 Million people will die this year as a result of malnutrition.
*20% of the corn grown in the U.S. is eaten by people.
*80% of the corn grown in the U.S. is eaten by livestock.
*90% of protein is wasted in cycling grain through livestock.
*One acre of land can produce 250 pounds of beef.
*One acre of land can produce 40,000 pounds of potatoes.
*56% of all farmland in the U.S. is devoted to beef production.
(Information from AnimalsSuffering.com)
Aspartame VS Splenda
This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 2:26 am by Stuart Davis
Song Of The Day: Shock The Monkey / Peter Gabriel
Word Of The Day: Sucralose / An intensely sweet, heat-stable derivative of sucrose that contains no calories.
I just want the truth, dammit. I just want to know what the fuck is what when it comes to Aspartame and Splenda. Well, in my efforts to determine such, it’s plain and clear that Aspartame is a toxic, radically poisonous agent in the human body. It doesn’t take much research to establish that. Splenda is bit different.
Since Diet Coke is my favorite-double-favorite drink in the World, I was really bummed out to learn of the seriously dangerous effects of Aspartame (Diet Coke’s big notorious ingredient). I was like, “oh, it turns your brain into fermaldahyde? Uhh…”. Conversely, I was so happy to see that Diet Coke had come out with a Splenda-sweetened version, just as I had decided my Aspartame habit had to go. Wow! I don’t have to give up Diet Coke.
Right?
Splenda, or ‘$ucralose’ as its known to kids at the sock hop, is a major, major success story. Quickly after being approved and introduced into the market, it seized a huge portion of the sweetener market. This really pisses off the people who sell sugar, and Aspartame, and Sweet ‘n Low. My simple question is: Is Splenda safe? Every answer to that question comes with a huge dose of spin. What I’ve learned is you can’t really believe any one, you have to take all the information from both sides into account. For instance,
One of the first sites I discovered in trying to find the truth about splenda, was a little web site called The Truth About Splenda. I learned all sorts of disturbing things there, things that made me want to not drink diet coke with Splenda as a sweetener. However, one of the things I DIDN’T learn at that web site is that is entirely FUNDED by the people who make Aspartame, ‘cuz they don’t want you consuming Splenda. Not only that, the alarming information about the “research” almost never links to the studies themselves. You ever notice that? It drives me crazy. People on the web are always citing studies and research and then never providing any link or resource for you to actually check the study your self and verify. So, I’m reading The Truth About Splenda, and going “oh NOOOOOO!” Then, later, I find THIS VERY INFORMATIVE SITE. You’ll notice it provides a point-by-point response to TTAS site, and it’s from a third party.
Here’s what I’ve deduced from the juice set loose on web’s caboose; Aspartame is fucking hideously dangerous to human beings. In 100 years, if we continue to evolve (or should i say “start”?), aspartame’s approval and introduction into the social-dietary mainstream will be regarded as an incredible, baffling assault transacted on the public in greed and avarice. It will be just like cigarettes and other profitable pathogens.
I don’t think Splenda is good for us either, but I don’t think it’s on the scale of horror that Aspartame is. Trying to tell exactly how dangerous Splenda is to humans is quite difficult, because everyone filters the information to you through their interests. They tell you ther’s been over 100 studies, but they don’t give you direct access to them. They don’t tell you that 99 of them were on animals, and they certainly don’t tell you that the human body often processes and reacts to certain artificially produced agents like Aspartame, like Splenda -IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT MANNER than rats to, or even monkeys. I really don’t think you can trust the FDA, and you sure as fuck can’t trust the corporations that make money from Aspartame, Splenda, Sweet ‘N Low, or even pure sugar. Refined sugar is no walk in the park for the body either. The bio chemistry in our miraculous human form is staggering. As I make a more earnest attempt to be conscious of what goes into my body, who makes it, how they make it, who suffers or benefits from its use and sale, it is both fascinating and beleaguring to me. The more you know, the more there is to know.
All of this is just my contention and exploration with ONE dietary item: Diet Coke. That is the tip of the tip of the iceberg. As I’ve been looking more closely into what it is to be a carnivore, I’m really getting bent out of shape again. AGH! Two things that make me sick about eating meat: The unethical, grotesque way animals are mass-farmed and commodified -the stunning suffering they go through so we can get fat and fucking SICK, and the insane health factors that accompany this cruel, bizarre choice. The more you study what it is to eat meat, and what it is to NOT eat meat, the more it digs a God-shaped hole in your heart. I went to my wife yesterday and told I might have to become a vegetarian again. I was vegetarian for eight years, then when I married her, I flipped over again, persuaded by her offer to assume ALL karma from my meat-eating. But karma is karma, whether i take it or she takes it, what’s the difference? we’re the same person, and why should either of us choose to increase suffering on the planet if we have any choice? AND you are HEALTHIER not eating meat. ahh… more to follow later. i gotta go inject Aspartame into my eyeball if i’m gonna see straight on all this shit…
Aspartame VS Splenda
This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 2:26 am by Stuart Davis
Song Of The Day: Shock The Monkey / Peter Gabriel
Word Of The Day: Sucralose / An intensely sweet, heat-stable derivative of sucrose that contains no calories.
I just want the truth, dammit. I just want to know what the fuck is what when it comes to Aspartame and Splenda. Well, in my efforts to determine such, it’s plain and clear that Aspartame is a toxic, radically poisonous agent in the human body. It doesn’t take much research to establish that. Splenda is bit different.
Since Diet Coke is my favorite-double-favorite drink in the World, I was really bummed out to learn of the seriously dangerous effects of Aspartame (Diet Coke’s big notorious ingredient). I was like, “oh, it turns your brain into fermaldahyde? Uhh…”. Conversely, I was so happy to see that Diet Coke had come out with a Splenda-sweetened version, just as I had decided my Aspartame habit had to go. Wow! I don’t have to give up Diet Coke.
Right?
Splenda, or ‘$ucralose’ as its known to kids at the sock hop, is a major, major success story. Quickly after being approved and introduced into the market, it seized a huge portion of the sweetener market. This really pisses off the people who sell sugar, and Aspartame, and Sweet ‘n Low. My simple question is: Is Splenda safe? Every answer to that question comes with a huge dose of spin. What I’ve learned is you can’t really believe any one, you have to take all the information from both sides into account. For instance,
One of the first sites I discovered in trying to find the truth about splenda, was a little web site called The Truth About Splenda. I learned all sorts of disturbing things there, things that made me want to not drink diet coke with Splenda as a sweetener. However, one of the things I DIDN’T learn at that web site is that is entirely FUNDED by the people who make Aspartame, ‘cuz they don’t want you consuming Splenda. Not only that, the alarming information about the “research” almost never links to the studies themselves. You ever notice that? It drives me crazy. People on the web are always citing studies and research and then never providing any link or resource for you to actually check the study your self and verify. So, I’m reading The Truth About Splenda, and going “oh NOOOOOO!” Then, later, I find THIS VERY INFORMATIVE SITE. You’ll notice it provides a point-by-point response to TTAS site, and it’s from a third party.
Here’s what I’ve deduced from the juice set loose on web’s caboose; Aspartame is fucking hideously dangerous to human beings. In 100 years, if we continue to evolve (or should i say “start”?), aspartame’s approval and introduction into the social-dietary mainstream will be regarded as an incredible, baffling assault transacted on the public in greed and avarice. It will be just like cigarettes and other profitable pathogens.
I don’t think Splenda is good for us either, but I don’t think it’s on the scale of horror that Aspartame is. Trying to tell exactly how dangerous Splenda is to humans is quite difficult, because everyone filters the information to you through their interests. They tell you ther’s been over 100 studies, but they don’t give you direct access to them. They don’t tell you that 99 of them were on animals, and they certainly don’t tell you that the human body often processes and reacts to certain artificially produced agents like Aspartame, like Splenda -IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT MANNER than rats to, or even monkeys. I really don’t think you can trust the FDA, and you sure as fuck can’t trust the corporations that make money from Aspartame, Splenda, Sweet ‘N Low, or even pure sugar. Refined sugar is no walk in the park for the body either. The bio chemistry in our miraculous human form is staggering. As I make a more earnest attempt to be conscious of what goes into my body, who makes it, how they make it, who suffers or benefits from its use and sale, it is both fascinating and beleaguring to me. The more you know, the more there is to know.
All of this is just my contention and exploration with ONE dietary item: Diet Coke. That is the tip of the tip of the iceberg. As I’ve been looking more closely into what it is to be a carnivore, I’m really getting bent out of shape again. AGH! Two things that make me sick about eating meat: The unethical, grotesque way animals are mass-farmed and commodified -the stunning suffering they go through so we can get fat and fucking SICK, and the insane health factors that accompany this cruel, bizarre choice. The more you study what it is to eat meat, and what it is to NOT eat meat, the more it digs a God-shaped hole in your heart. I went to my wife yesterday and told I might have to become a vegetarian again. I was vegetarian for eight years, then when I married her, I flipped over again, persuaded by her offer to assume ALL karma from my meat-eating. But karma is karma, whether i take it or she takes it, what’s the difference? we’re the same person, and why should either of us choose to increase suffering on the planet if we have any choice? AND you are HEALTHIER not eating meat. ahh… more to follow later. i gotta go inject Aspartame into my eyeball if i’m gonna see straight on all this shit…
My Either / Or Disorder
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 4:49 pm by Stuart Davis
Song of the day: Save It For Later / English Beat
Word of the day: Suspiration / 1, Sighing; a sigh. 2, Deep breathing; breath; a deep breath. (from the Latin suspiratio).
Picked up Roshi from the airport again last night. I’ve been really lucky to be able to take him to and from the airport twice in the last week, which means lots of one on one time in the car, and I get to pick his Big Heart-Mind about whatever I want while we drive. Last night we got onto the subject or morality in the West. He talked about how sometimes Westerners try to superimpose or blend Western morality on Zen. Zen, he said is not moral, or immoral. I was really glad to talk about it, because personally, I think I am definitely beset with confusion and delusion about this often.
When you are raised in what is basically a conventional Christian culture as I was (by conventional, I mean most of what calls itself Christianity in the West is either pre-conventional or convential world views), of course it influences very strongly how you interpret and regard morality, ethics, and so on. You might get trapped in it, or rail against it, or (often in my case) get trapped by railing against. If you clutch anything too tightly it turns into a turd. I’m paraphrasing here, but Roshi often says something to the effect of ‘the worst kind of non-duality is the non-duality that thinks it’s better than non-non-duality.’ Which is what has characterized so much of my attempt to rest in what IS.
For better or worse, for whatever reasons, I have a real sticking point with judging things. To begin, I have a big ego, a strong personality, and a flair for drama and emphatic definitives. For someone who’s supposedly a Zen practitioner, I exhibit an incredibly capacity for Judging, which is very different from Discerning. Discerning is when you’re wise enough to take the pebbles out of your rice. Judging is when you go off on a crusade about the evils of pebbles. Pebbles are pebbles, they SHOULD be pebbles. Don’t eat them. End of story.
This reflex I have to parse reality into categories, but worse- to assign my judgements- is not useful. My wife paints a door on our house, and I look at it and think “that’s not a very good paint job. it’s not precise, the borders are sloppy.” It has to be a perfectly painted door, or it’s not a “good” door. What fucking sort of metaphor is that for one finding their way through the Labyrinth? I have such strong opinions about things. On a good day, that’s just for fun, it’s just taking the ego for a drive around the block, not mistaking it for “Reality”. But I have to admit, over and over again I get lost in it.
Take my recent blog where I villified Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan for making advertisements for AOL through voice-overs and commercialized films. I also slammed Bruce Hornsby quite severely for making a Lowes commercial with his song “Gonna Be Some Changes Made.” Really, what do I know of any of these people’s lives? All I know is what I’ve seen on T.V. and in the movies, or read on the net. That’s not shit. It gets even more hypocritical when you consider that one of the things I feel sad about in this culture is how our media (radio, t.v. especially) have become these unremitting pulpits for uninformed people with extreme opinions to spew diatribe after diatribe, all from one tiny, monocular perspective. They clench one little perspective, identify with it completely, and then assault the World endlessly with rants and tantrums. And that’s exactly what I was doing with all those people. I don’t know Tom Hanks, or Meg Ryan, or Julia Roberts, and… well, I’ve slept with Bruce Hornsby, so that’s something, but you get my point. I’m not in a position to dismiss them so easily or harshly.
It’s my Either / Or disorder.
This is a disorder because it’s a pathological aberration in my ability to discern, and especially to simply loving embrace the mess of Life. Does morality count? Are ethics important? Yes, certainly so. Roshi is plain and direct with me about moral matters of consequence: Do not cheat on your wife, work dillegently to lovingly deal with your challenges in such areas, and then he helps me with tools to do so. But Zen is not morality. Zen is not immorality. Zen is not ethics, politics, social dynamics, psyhcology, and it is not the opposition to any of those things.
In the Absolute sense, that which IS is unborn, undying, unmade, unknowable, ever-present and immediate. Perfected at all times in all places.
In the Relative sense, the World of form evolves. The Universe issued forth from something -who knows how or what- and ever since the birth of form it has ceaselessly changed, developed, and evolved. This moment and everything included in it is a question mark sanctified by a comma ( ? , ) not an exclamation point or a period.
The problem is not me taking a perspective, or having an opinion, or a belief system, or preferences. Those are all the gifts of life. The problem is my clenching them so tight they turn into turds. It’s when I identify with all the impermanent parts that it gets insane, then I have to prop it up, over and over, and defend it, and justify it, and then I have to go out in the World and try to convert others to it, and make the Reality conform to my reality. That has never, ever in the history of the Kosmos, every worked. Zen is not the Absolute, or the Relative.
A free-functioning integrated human being has options. Take the perspective of the ego? Sure. Let it go? Sure. Rest in the non-seeking mind? Let it go? Sure. Abide as the master? Sure. Let it go? OK. Be the judge, the skeptic, the wounded child, Great Doubt, or the Controller, and then have the option, the free-choice to let any of them go. Big Heart, Big Mind, or Protector, they are all aspects of one Self, and they are all our inheritance, and no particular one of them is something called “Zen”. Does any “I” know what Zen is? What sort of knowing would be knowing what Zen is?
Doesn’t matter if we want to say Zen or Reality, or God, or whatever. God is not either / or. Let me not kid my self that these fluxing, morphing WHISPS -phantoms, most of them- are something enduring that I can deeply trust. What will be here, where I am standing in 50,000 years? In five seconds? I have no fucking clue. I can make up all sorts of ideas, guesses, wishes, predictions, but no-one has a fucking clue.
I love and adore being a human being. It is an unbelievable gift. All of these options, these endless aspects that are given to me as options are amazing. But it won’t make me a better human being to cling to them, to try and take one or two of them and concretize them as if they are permanent, or deeply enduring. They’re not. It’s ALL VAPOR. My life will be over in the blink of an eye, and when it ends, it will end in the present moment, which is this very moment right now, the only one that’s ever existed. Have I ever had an experience in the past? In the future? Not once, ever. Even my memories of th past or only experienced in the present. My dreams of the future only arise in the present. I’m typing in the present right now, and when I die, it will be in the present. That means, this is the moment of my death.
It’s not either / or. The vapors of these “identities” (ego, controller, skeptic, big heart, non-seeking self) all come and go, they have no permanent reality. AND, they are here, right now, available to me through direct experience. I don’t have to try and make them something they’re not -Permanent, fixed, infinite, or immortal. And I don’t have to get rid of them, I’m not going to deny them, dismiss them, or belittle them because they’re temporary. “Temporal” as in “time” - once you put you’re foot into the stream of time, everything is impermanent, passing, being born and dying. Zen is not temporal, and Zen is not not-temporal.
Today my lesson is not to go for an either / or. Just let it be what it is, and what it isn’t, and that’s fine. In Love, I can act from that space of allowing spontaneously. I can engage my ego if it’s useful, or fun, or let it go when it’s useful or fun. Can I hear from the Master? (”YES, here I AM!!!”). Good. The master will drop off too, sometime, and all the others. I don’t need this story to last forever in order to love it, appreciate it, and fully live its perfection. Things can and will be totally fucked up, and it’s cool. Zen is not a story. Zen is not the absence of a story. Let’s play!!
My Either / Or Disorder
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 4:49 pm by Stuart Davis
Song of the day: Save It For Later / English Beat
Word of the day: Suspiration / 1, Sighing; a sigh. 2, Deep breathing; breath; a deep breath. (from the Latin suspiratio).
Picked up Roshi from the airport again last night. I’ve been really lucky to be able to take him to and from the airport twice in the last week, which means lots of one on one time in the car, and I get to pick his Big Heart-Mind about whatever I want while we drive. Last night we got onto the subject or morality in the West. He talked about how sometimes Westerners try to superimpose or blend Western morality on Zen. Zen, he said is not moral, or immoral. I was really glad to talk about it, because personally, I think I am definitely beset with confusion and delusion about this often.
When you are raised in what is basically a conventional Christian culture as I was (by conventional, I mean most of what calls itself Christianity in the West is either pre-conventional or convential world views), of course it influences very strongly how you interpret and regard morality, ethics, and so on. You might get trapped in it, or rail against it, or (often in my case) get trapped by railing against. If you clutch anything too tightly it turns into a turd. I’m paraphrasing here, but Roshi often says something to the effect of ‘the worst kind of non-duality is the non-duality that thinks it’s better than non-non-duality.’ Which is what has characterized so much of my attempt to rest in what IS.
For better or worse, for whatever reasons, I have a real sticking point with judging things. To begin, I have a big ego, a strong personality, and a flair for drama and emphatic definitives. For someone who’s supposedly a Zen practitioner, I exhibit an incredibly capacity for Judging, which is very different from Discerning. Discerning is when you’re wise enough to take the pebbles out of your rice. Judging is when you go off on a crusade about the evils of pebbles. Pebbles are pebbles, they SHOULD be pebbles. Don’t eat them. End of story.
This reflex I have to parse reality into categories, but worse- to assign my judgements- is not useful. My wife paints a door on our house, and I look at it and think “that’s not a very good paint job. it’s not precise, the borders are sloppy.” It has to be a perfectly painted door, or it’s not a “good” door. What fucking sort of metaphor is that for one finding their way through the Labyrinth? I have such strong opinions about things. On a good day, that’s just for fun, it’s just taking the ego for a drive around the block, not mistaking it for “Reality”. But I have to admit, over and over again I get lost in it.
Take my recent blog where I villified Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan for making advertisements for AOL through voice-overs and commercialized films. I also slammed Bruce Hornsby quite severely for making a Lowes commercial with his song “Gonna Be Some Changes Made.” Really, what do I know of any of these people’s lives? All I know is what I’ve seen on T.V. and in the movies, or read on the net. That’s not shit. It gets even more hypocritical when you consider that one of the things I feel sad about in this culture is how our media (radio, t.v. especially) have become these unremitting pulpits for uninformed people with extreme opinions to spew diatribe after diatribe, all from one tiny, monocular perspective. They clench one little perspective, identify with it completely, and then assault the World endlessly with rants and tantrums. And that’s exactly what I was doing with all those people. I don’t know Tom Hanks, or Meg Ryan, or Julia Roberts, and… well, I’ve slept with Bruce Hornsby, so that’s something, but you get my point. I’m not in a position to dismiss them so easily or harshly.
It’s my Either / Or disorder.
This is a disorder because it’s a pathological aberration in my ability to discern, and especially to simply loving embrace the mess of Life. Does morality count? Are ethics important? Yes, certainly so. Roshi is plain and direct with me about moral matters of consequence: Do not cheat on your wife, work dillegently to lovingly deal with your challenges in such areas, and then he helps me with tools to do so. But Zen is not morality. Zen is not immorality. Zen is not ethics, politics, social dynamics, psyhcology, and it is not the opposition to any of those things.
In the Absolute sense, that which IS is unborn, undying, unmade, unknowable, ever-present and immediate. Perfected at all times in all places.
In the Relative sense, the World of form evolves. The Universe issued forth from something -who knows how or what- and ever since the birth of form it has ceaselessly changed, developed, and evolved. This moment and everything included in it is a question mark sanctified by a comma ( ? , ) not an exclamation point or a period.
The problem is not me taking a perspective, or having an opinion, or a belief system, or preferences. Those are all the gifts of life. The problem is my clenching them so tight they turn into turds. It’s when I identify with all the impermanent parts that it gets insane, then I have to prop it up, over and over, and defend it, and justify it, and then I have to go out in the World and try to convert others to it, and make the Reality conform to my reality. That has never, ever in the history of the Kosmos, every worked. Zen is not the Absolute, or the Relative.
A free-functioning integrated human being has options. Take the perspective of the ego? Sure. Let it go? Sure. Rest in the non-seeking mind? Let it go? Sure. Abide as the master? Sure. Let it go? OK. Be the judge, the skeptic, the wounded child, Great Doubt, or the Controller, and then have the option, the free-choice to let any of them go. Big Heart, Big Mind, or Protector, they are all aspects of one Self, and they are all our inheritance, and no particular one of them is something called “Zen”. Does any “I” know what Zen is? What sort of knowing would be knowing what Zen is?
Doesn’t matter if we want to say Zen or Reality, or God, or whatever. God is not either / or. Let me not kid my self that these fluxing, morphing WHISPS -phantoms, most of them- are something enduring that I can deeply trust. What will be here, where I am standing in 50,000 years? In five seconds? I have no fucking clue. I can make up all sorts of ideas, guesses, wishes, predictions, but no-one has a fucking clue.
I love and adore being a human being. It is an unbelievable gift. All of these options, these endless aspects that are given to me as options are amazing. But it won’t make me a better human being to cling to them, to try and take one or two of them and concretize them as if they are permanent, or deeply enduring. They’re not. It’s ALL VAPOR. My life will be over in the blink of an eye, and when it ends, it will end in the present moment, which is this very moment right now, the only one that’s ever existed. Have I ever had an experience in the past? In the future? Not once, ever. Even my memories of th past or only experienced in the present. My dreams of the future only arise in the present. I’m typing in the present right now, and when I die, it will be in the present. That means, this is the moment of my death.
It’s not either / or. The vapors of these “identities” (ego, controller, skeptic, big heart, non-seeking self) all come and go, they have no permanent reality. AND, they are here, right now, available to me through direct experience. I don’t have to try and make them something they’re not -Permanent, fixed, infinite, or immortal. And I don’t have to get rid of them, I’m not going to deny them, dismiss them, or belittle them because they’re temporary. “Temporal” as in “time” - once you put you’re foot into the stream of time, everything is impermanent, passing, being born and dying. Zen is not temporal, and Zen is not not-temporal.
Today my lesson is not to go for an either / or. Just let it be what it is, and what it isn’t, and that’s fine. In Love, I can act from that space of allowing spontaneously. I can engage my ego if it’s useful, or fun, or let it go when it’s useful or fun. Can I hear from the Master? (”YES, here I AM!!!”). Good. The master will drop off too, sometime, and all the others. I don’t need this story to last forever in order to love it, appreciate it, and fully live its perfection. Things can and will be totally fucked up, and it’s cool. Zen is not a story. Zen is not the absence of a story. Let’s play!!